Sunday, 1 July 2012

Blue Moon Princess' Dress

Hello people! Isn't the picture above simply gorgeous? Well, that is the mascot of SMU! One of the clusters in an event - Emerge KL 2012. Click here to learn more about it!

Note : We won 2nd place with this mascot! Woohooo!!! Proud of everyone in SMU, especially the committed committees!

Today, I'm going to show you guys how the dress for the character above is done! We made it all from scratch and the idea is ORIGINAL!

First of all, we bought TONS of duct tape. Then, we started wrapping the model layer by layer as she wears an old clothing.

When part of the shape is done, I slit the middle so that it could be removed from the model.

Our beloved cluster's colour is blue. We decided to get blue spray paint instead of blue duct tape as that would be too dark. I tested it out first before buying more cans of them.

We continued on the next day with the skirt. In order to save duct tape, I got garbage bags as the base and taped all around it. Newspapers had to be stuffed around her hips before taping to make a puffed up shape. We wanted it puffier, but it was pretty hard to do so with duct tape.

We sprayed the top blue before we continued on.

The next day, I woke up early to stuff the bottom of the mannequin with newspapers before making the full skirt. It was pretty hard as each diameter of the skirt was different. This caused wrinkles in the outfit. That afternoon, when Jennifer - the model came, I started drawing out the pattern and cut the design out. I love how it frames the collar bones and how the skirt's curves is unique and different. I did one side longer and the other shorter on purpose. Sadly, it's not as obvious. I still love it though.

Peacock feathers were added! How lovely! They eyes of the peacock feathers are just beautiful!

Towards the end of the dress-making, the guys started to work on the LED lights. They solder everything themselves and took nights to keep checking that all is fine.

A couple others helped me in chopping up CDs with pairs of scissors.

Look at all the shiny surfaces!! I love them!

All the extras that were not used. Many of them are not used because they have extra cuts in them. CDs are not that easy to work with at times. I don't know where the idea came from, perhaps from my love of mosaics, but I randomly decided to use these CD pieces to do the lining of the dress. It wasn't in the sketch that I submitted in. The idea only came much later. I did decide to have a lining, but not with CDs.

Yeap, every bit of the CD pieces were stuck on ONE by ONE. It took about 4hours plus to finish the entire BOTTOM lining (excluding the collar area). Note that to match the mosaic lines, you have to stick it on from one side and continue on without skipping spaces. Also, some pieces need to be re-cut to fit nicely.

The committee members only went home at 6am that day. Some of them had
work at 7:30am. I slept around 7:45am after a little cleaning up and a
nice bath.

The first part of the lining DONE.

This was how messy the place was. CD pieces were all over the floor. Note that duct tape is stiff and unlike usual fabric that is easy to fold over smoothly. The dress has to always be opened up flat to be worked on.

Well, that is pretty much what I have to share about the dress for now. The mask and the boots would be posted up tomorrow instead as this post is already really long.

Before you go, let me show you what my living room has turned into for the couple of days:

Yeap. A garbage bin. Everything was everywhere. From the small hall area right to the doorstep! Even the tiny alley to the kitchen has some stuff crawling about. Well. That's it. I shall stop here for this post. Stay tuned for the mask and the boots! Bye people! Keep smiling and be jolly!